Hedera Hashgraph launches mainnet early access program

Tuesday, December 18, 2018

Hedera Hashgraph, a next-generation public ledger designed to have highly diversified governance and the most distributed consensus at scale, today announced the launch of its initial Community Testing Program.

The first phase of the program allows developers and individuals to test the mainnet and testnets and earn up to 1000 hbars, Hedera’s native cryptocurrency, for testing the network and developing third-party applications on it.

The Hedera Wallet and new sample applications – including a content site, The Daily Timestamp, and a micropayments Chrome extension – are now available for consumers to test using hbars. Developers can now also gain access to testnets to begin building applications at no charge, and have access to new developer resources at hedera.com.

Hedera’s vision is to create a more trusted, secure and empowered digital future for everyone. Developers will enable this world by building trusted applications that enable people to play games together, work together, and buy and sell goods and services safely and securely, without entrusting a central organization with their data and privacy.

“Events over the past few years have made it clear that consumers have great concerns about their data privacy, such as when reading articles or viewing videos that require them to reveal personal credit card information, or be flooded with ads and have their online behavior tracked. Opening our mainnet for testing is the next step in delivering Hedera’s vision of an internet where individuals have much greater control over their own personal data and benefit more directly from its value.”

Dr. Leemon Baird, Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Hedera

“Many members of the community have expressed interest in helping us test our mainnet, and we are excited to take the next step in our development by opening the network for such testing. We are especially excited that consumers will get their first taste of the kinds of freedom of data ownership that micropayments can bring to business models, and that developers will have a comprehensive set of resources to start building applications that harness this power to disintermediate a huge variety of services.”